Mirrored Man: The Rob Tyler Chronicles Book 1 by GJ Fortier Page A

rarely did
anyway. Her most striking feature was her sapphire blue eyes. With
those eyes she had been known to stab men outright or simply melt
their hearts, depending on the circumstances.
    Her looks had been an obstacle when she was
younger. As a result, she had learned to develop her relationships
cautiously. She had seen colleagues build walls around themselves
as a defense mechanism and as a way to gain the respect of their
peers, both male and female, thereby losing themselves in a black
hole of sterile personality and any hope of real friendships. Some
of them became so wrapped up in their work that they actually lost
interest in any kind of human interaction at all, other than
professionally.
    On the other hand, she had seen those whom
she considered talented settle for lives of mediocrity in their
pursuits of personal relationships when, in her opinion, it was far
too early in their careers for them to do so. Or worse, throw their
livelihoods away by making the mistake of starting families before
they were ready in foolish attempts to satisfy meaningless urges
resulting in life-altering consequences.
    June was the purpose-driven daughter of
Baptist missionaries serving in Africa. She was born in the city of
Arba Minch at the base of the western side of the Great Rift Valley
in southwestern Ethiopia, where her parents were assisting the
locals in building a school. Her mother Mae, a gynecologist, and
father Jonah, a dentist, also provided free services to the
indigenous people as the other professionals in their group did.
They traveled extensively throughout Africa and the Middle East.
June became fluent in English, French, German, Amharic, and Arabic
by the age of ten. It was then that her parents, following their
meticulous plan for her upbringing, had enrolled her in Moffat's
School located in Shropshire, England, where she would receive a
formal education as well as have an opportunity to spend time with
children her own age.
    In the beginning, the change had traumatized
young June. She had been accustomed to an environment where she had
the opportunity to form relationships with wild animals of all
sorts as they were encountered in her various journeys. Her parents
had given her the news while visiting the Comoros Islands off
Madagascar, where she had befriended a ring-tailed lemur that she
named Bobo. She’d insisted that he be allowed to sleep with her.
However, Bobo had the annoying habit of sleeping all day and
keeping June awake at night, which had dulled the pain of
separation a bit.
    Eventually, she had adjusted to her new
environment at Moffat’s. It soon became obvious that June was quite
a gifted child. She had excelled academically far beyond the other
students in attendance. While she interacted well socially, she had
formed no deep friendships. Her first love was always animals. Her
spare time had been spent roaming the nearby forests in search of
new friends and trying to teach the other kids how to interact with
them. But she found that it was not something that could be taught.
This connection to animals was her special gift, and hers
alone.
    Her potential had eventually become obvious,
even to the most skeptical of instructors. Upon their
recommendation, she was accepted to Sanford-Brown University in
Ohio at the age of thirteen. There she had been allowed to
participate in special projects such as private encounters at the
Cincinnati zoo, as well as other hands-on activities in places such
as the San Diego Zoo and the Woods Hole Science Aquarium. By the
age of sixteen, she had experienced animals, both wild and
domesticated, in a way few do in a lifetime.
    She had quickly earned her bachelor’s degree
in animal psychology and later, at Penn State, earned her master’s
in philosophy. For the next five years, she had studied primates
at many of the zoos in North America. During breaks in her
studies, she had sometimes traveled with her parents as they
continued their missionary work abroad,